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High-value care has been added to curricula for many aspiring physicians

Health system executives struggling to improve the value of health care delivery can take encouragement from this: Many of today’s medical students are learning about high-value care as part of their training.

That wasn’t the case when Brandon Combs, M.D., an internist at UC Health in Denver, and his friend Tanner Caverly, M.D., an internist at the VA Ann Arbor (Mich.) Healthcare System, were in medical school.

“We noticed that patients often received well-intended medical care that was probably unnecessary, but there wasn’t a place in our training curriculum to help identify and limit such occurrences,” says Combs, assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

In 2012, they co-founded the Do No Harm project, in which medical students and residents are invited to write a short narrative describing an experience in which medical overuse resulted in — or posed the threat of — harm to a patient. Participants must cite evidence from the medical literature that supports their argument about the specific overuse and evidence about how performance could be improved. The project inspired JAMA Internal Medicine to launch its Teachable Moment series. By publishing many of the Do No Harm case studies, the series allows medical trainees — and all other readers — around the world to learn from the authors’ reflections on low-value care.

Meanwhile, Mayo Clinic School of Medicine and Arizona State University included high-value care as one of six domains in their new Science of Health Care Delivery curriculum that launched in 2015. Other domains include team-based care, population-based care and person-centered care.Read Full Article